Ambush marketing is one of those things you either love or hate depending on whether you’re the practitioner or the victim. Recently a Texas beer brand, Shiner, ambushed Heineken at the Austin City Limits Music Festival in a way that I think actually qualifies as Marketing as Service.

Here is part of the story as reported by AdAge last week:

Shiner wasn’t even available inside the festival. But that didn’t stop its ad agency, McGarrah Jessee, from targeting the 65,000 people attending. So the shop printed up Shiner koozies designed to look just like Shiner cans and had street teams hand them out to festival-goers. Sure, they might not have sold any beer that day, but they did get the brand out there in a way that anyone with a soft spot for scrappy underdogs would appreciate.

Providing koozies at a music festival is indeed Marketing as Service, however simple it may seem. In fact, koozies provide the dual service of keeping the beer colder longer while keeping the hands warmer and drier. It also gave beer drinkers the opportunity to “wear” a brand that some may have felt was more in tune with this heavily Texan event and their lifestyles.

Of course, if I had been working for Heineken I would have been pretty ticked off at the event organizers for letting the Shiner koozies onto the festival grounds. Perhaps at their next concert event they’ll provide Heineken branded koozies that attendees could take home, re-use and maybe even drive them to a website that tied it all together. Every event marketer has to be prepared for ambushers and the best way to do this is think like one and beat them to the punch with service (and not just messaging.)

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